


Lullaby

by kittydesade



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:26:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eddie can't sleep, can't get comfortable on the beach or in his own skin, and can't really believe Roland said something that actually helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lullaby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [janie_tangerine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/gifts).



Eddie couldn't sleep, and it wasn't because of the drugs.

Drugs, lack of drugs. One thing or another, they were behind most of his problems since Roland had dragged him out of his world and into this strange beach-shaped hell. He didn't tell Roland about most of it, although he had the feeling the lanky bastard knew. Hard to hide the vomiting and shaking, the fever and chills and sweaty skin and everything else. It was a little easier to pretend he wasn't getting paranoid about everything in this world trying to kill him, including the gunslinger himself. He knew that was the DTs, if Roland wanted to kill him he'd have done it already.

He gave up on trying to go back to sleep sometime after one unfamiliar star pattern crawled under the sea. Sat up, arms draped over his knees, and watched the lapping water twinkle little points of light back at the sky.

"You should sleep while you have the chance."

Roland hadn't moved. Eddie was sure Roland hadn't moved, but the man was awake anyway. Did he _ever_ sleep?

"Can't sleep," Eddie muttered, pretty sure Roland would hear him. "Lobsters'll eat me."

He couldn't see if Roland was smiling. "We're above their territory. They won't come this far ashore."

"Says the man who already became an hors d'oeuvre."

"I don't know what that is." And Roland sounded annoyed that Eddie was still talking about things that he didn't understand at an hour when most reasonable people were long asleep.

Eddie lay back again and dug the back of his head into the sand until he'd created a little indentation for his neck. Five minutes later he realized that was a great way to put a crick in his neck and sat up again. This time he had a long, lean shadow.

"You don't have to sit up with me, you know," Eddie told the sand between his feet. He reached back and brushed the sand out of his hair and down his shirt, which of course made it so much better. Roland might have shrugged or made a noise, he couldn't tell. The sea filled his ears.

He did hear when Roland's boots crunched into the dune next to him. For a second he half turned his head to look up at him, then dropped his chin down to his chest. This late at night with hardly any moon it was hard to see his face and if he looked up he'd see what Roland really thought of him.

"How's your, uh, digits, anyway?" Eddie asked, because the silence was getting on his nerves worse than the sand down his back.

"Good." After a second or two Roland seemed to understand why Eddie had asked, despite helping Roland with the bandages and the drugs for the past several days. "The ..."

"Keflex."

"Yes. The drugs seem to be doing their work."

Roland couldn't just come out and say something was good, or that it worked, or that he liked it. He had to hedge his bets somehow. Eddie hated that about him, he'd always hated that about people, how they couldn't take a stand on one thing or another. With Roland, every time he said something like that it made Eddie wonder why he'd dragged him out here in the first place. Except for the fact that he'd kind of needed another pair of hands and a healthy body to make it anywhere, as infected as those bites had been. Except that Eddie was pretty far from a healthy body.

He fumbled around for something to say, anything. "Never liked the beach much when I was a kid," was what came out of his mouth, and it sounded like whining when he said it out loud, so he didn't finish the rest of that sentence.

"We had no seas where I came from," Roland offered, the first time Eddie could remember him volunteering anything about his past. Maybe just the first time he heard it without being coked out of his mind.

He gave it a second. "What was it like?"

Roland creaked down to the sand, sat in a mirror pose of Eddie's except that his legs were somehow longer and he gave the impression of being made of driftwood sticks. "Very serious. Very ... strong. We are... were," he corrected himself. "A proud people."

"I got that part," Eddie muttered. All that shit about the face of my father and respect and honor made him sound like something out of one of those old sword and sandal movies, High King Roland and the Quest for the Holy Grail. "With your shield or on it."

"Something like that."

Eddie snorted. "Now why am I not surprised... you'd probably get along great with the Spartans." And the only reason Eddie knew that was because the 300 Spartans had been on TV late one night when he was up with a fever. All the Hoplite armor in full Cinescope color had made an impression.

"Who?"

"Never mind."

Any second now Roland would get up and move back to his sleeping spot, tell Eddie to get his head down and get some more sleep, make him feel like a kid again. Any second. The water lapped against the sand and Roland breathed and Eddie fidgeted and beneath that he could hear the sound of creatures shifting along the edge of the shore, but other than that, nothing. No movement. No getting up and walking away.

Roland moved his hand down by his side and did something that shifted creaking leather. When he came up again, he had a bullet in his hand. One of the wets, Eddie supposed. He rolled it over and over his fingers where it caught the starlight, and Eddie watched because, shit, there wasn't much else to do when they were both insomniacs in the middle of the night, was there? He knew what Roland was doing. But he watched anyway. He thought it might have been a while since anyone cared whether or not he got some rest.

"When I was a child," Roland began, in a raspy voice and with the kind of stuttering cadence that said he wasn't used to telling bedtime stories, or hearing them for that matter. "When I couldn't sleep, when I was a very young child, my mother would tell me stories of the kings of old. Of Arthur Eld, from whose line my father said we were descended, and ..."

"His knights of the round table," Eddie murmured, head falling forward onto his hands. "We have those stories, too."

He couldn't be sure, but he thought Roland smiled a little. At least it sounded like it when he spoke. "It was many years ago, or so they say, when the good Queen died by the plotting if not the hands of the King's wicked advisor..."


End file.
